‘IT’ Trailer Scares Up Worldwide Traffic Record In First 24 Hours With Near 200M, Smokes ‘Fate Of The Furious’

EXCLUSIVE: Within 24 hours of its CinemaCon debut on Wednesday, the trailer for New Line/Warner Bros. upcoming Stephen King feature adaptationItsmashed global traffic records with 197 million views, blowing past the previous record of 139M set by Universal’s The Fate of the Furious back in December.

New Line released the trailer for the Andres Muschietti-directed horror film in English along with 30 localized versions starting at 9 AM Wednesday (watch it here). Of its 197M global views, more than 81M views and over 1.8M shares are from the U.S. Facebook instances alone. Within hours after its release, the It trailer became a viral sensation, trending across Facebook and Twitter and rising to the top of the Reddit Homepage with 30K-plus “up” votes in four hours. The video quickly rose to the No. 1 position on YouTube’s trending videos and remained there throughout the day.

The trailer helped It trend globally on Twitter with trends for It, It Movie, Pennywise and the Red Balloon Emoji all appearing.

Based on the 1986 novel by King, It follows seven children who are terrorized by the eponymous being, who exploits the fears and phobias of its victims in order to disguise itself while hunting its prey. It generally appears as a clown, Pennywise, in order to lure young children.

It opens on September 8, the weekend after Labor Day — which has been a hotbed for Warner Bros in the past with the opening of Clint Eastwood’s Sully ($35M) and the Steven Soderbergh thriller Contagion ($22.4M). The pic starring Bill Skarsgård is produced by Dan Lin, Roy Lee, David Katzenberg, Seth Grahame-Smith and Barbara Muschietti.

Here is a chart of the top movie trailers ranked by their 24-hour global traffic: